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Python Is On Its Way To The Top Of The World

By Vahid Haghzare, Director Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment &
Armie Garcia, Marketing Associate, Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment

One of the top IT Recruitment Agencies in Hong Kong, Dubai, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Singapore, and Japan, SVA Recruitment is an IT and employment agency that provides jobs, executive search, and recruitment services.

Looking back on 2021, Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment can confidently say Python has been our most in-demand role to the technical language requested by employers and hiring managers in the development and programming IT Recruitment field.

This has been consistent in all the markets we operate in-
Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Japan, and Dubai.

In preparation for 2022, SVA Recruitment’s IT Recruiters did some reading on the latest rankings in programming languages and noted some unsurprising and surprising information.

Python to become world’s top programming language in 2022

Python is becoming the most popular computer programming language, potentially overtaking C in the Premier League of top-ranked programming languages according to the 20-year-old Tiobe index.

Gaining popularity for the past few years, Python has even had recently surpassed Java recently as the second most popular language behind C.

Software testing firm, Tiobe, bases its rankings of programming languages on searches carried out on popular search engines and websites.

Only 2 other languages- C and Java- have ever held the top spot in the Tiobe Index in the last 20 years. But Python is on the verge of overtaking the number 1 spot only needing to cross 0.16% to outdo C. If this happens, a new milestone will have been reached.

Other rankings on language popularity have similar views. Developer analyst RedMonk had JavaScript in top place in 2019, followed by Python and Java, pointing C as tenth. IEEE Spectrum, an electrical engineering magazine, ranked Python as the most popular language in 2020, second being Java, followed by C and JavaScript.

The Top 10 languages of 2021

Tiobe’s top 10 programming languages were:
1. C
2. Python
3. Java
4. C++
5. C#
6. Visual Basic
7. Java Script
8. Assembly language
9. PHP
10. SQL

Also included on the Top 20 programming languages are:

• Classic Visual Basic
• Groovy
• Ruby
• Go
• Swift
• MATLAB
• Fortran
• R
• Perl
• Delphi

How has C endured for so long?

The programming language C, built in the 1970s, persists in popularity as a foundational language that offers direct access to hardware.

However, it has also unfortunately become known for being susceptible to memory-related security susceptibilities, and seems to be finally coming to the end of its life by a new language…

Remember the name- Rust

The Mozilla-created Rust language has seen some recent uptake as a replacement for C in systems programming. Similar syntactically to C++ but with an ability to guarantee memory safety by using a borrow checker to validate references.

Microsoft is also working on bringing Rust to Windows and Azure, Google is using Rust on Android with its efforts to put Rust as a second language to C in the Linux kernel, and Amazon Web Services is now using the language for infrastructure programming.

Although Rust is still new, it isn’t as popular as Python due to its ease to learn and is also supported by NumPy and TensorFlow for several machine-learning libraries and frameworks.

Python still struggles in Mobile and Web Apps

Python has surged in popularity mainly because of machine learning.

However, it has not gained much traction in mobile app development or web applications or development on mobile devices due to be being quite slow.

And if it cannot find a way to fix this, it might go the same as C, with an upstart like Rust swopping in to replace it, and definitely within a few years, rather than a few decades.

Its creator, Guido van Rossum, who currently works at Microsoft, was quoted as saying Python's performance is exhausting too much energy and memory from hardware, and he is working to improve this.

At this year’s PyCon conference, van Rossum stated “The people who have managed to cross-compile CPython to run on an Android tablet or even on iOS, they find that it eats up a lot of resources”.

"Compared to what the mobile operating system expects, Python is big and slow. It uses a lot of battery charge, so if you're coding in Python, you would probably very quickly run down your battery and quickly run out of memory" he added.

Recently, the Python Software Foundation designated a Developer in Residence (DIR) to work full-time on the Core Python (CPython) - the main implementation of open-source Python with which other versions of Pythons were established.

The Resurgence of Fortran

On a final note, the return of Fortran as a top 20 programming language is remarkable. Tiobe ranked it as the 50th most popular programming language as recently as July 2020. Earlier this year in Tiobe’s index, Fortran rose astonishingly to 20th place.

A programming language designed by IBM in the 1950s, Fortran maintains its popularity for coding on the world's most powerful supercomputers. Though some committee members of the US Fortran standards feel that other programming languages are replacing it in domains where Fortran is traditionally good. The downside of Fortran is that coding new features can risk killing older code.

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Silicon Valley Associates is ideally positioned to support the continual demand from tech companies and IT Departments looking to hire in Hong Kong, Asia, and Worldwide. Please let us know if you would further advise on the above topic or your hiring needs